PIASA Archives

online archives

The Archive consists, at present, of many valuable, precious archival manuscripts, ca. 400 linear feet of processed material. They are included in 75 collections. The archival collections include manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, maps and sound recordings preserving for the future the knowledge of Polish history and the history of Poles in America. A special preservation program is being built for our precious archival collection.There are three main parts of manuscript holdings:

Political manuscript collections: Polish Legation in Rio de Janeiro (1918-1945); Polish Embassy in the United States (1919-1945); records of Polish political parties and their leaders in exile: The Polish Christian Democratic Labor Party, The Polish National Party, Polish Socialist Party. There are records regarding the federalist movement in exile in the period 1942-1957: Feliks Gross Papers; The Polish Federalist Association Division in Chicago, The Polish Freedom Movement “NID” Division in New York. Also there are records and 200 tapes with sound recordings of the Radio Free Europe Broadcast in New York (1951-1989) and a collection of bulletins and correspondence of democratic opposition in Poland (1963-1985).

Artists' and scholars' private papers: Polish poets - Jan Lechon Papers (1938-1936), Kazimierz Wierzynski papers (1953-1959), writer and journalist Bohdan Pawlowicz Papers (1931-1967), writer Andrzej Bobkowski (1938-1961) and scholars' papers: Oskar Halecki, Waclaw Lednicki and Ludwik Krzyzanowski.
The majority of the listed materials were found in archival guides and Internet resources or through research done in archives and libraries in the United States. At the moment only a part of the researched materials has been recorded. Our website, which will be regularly updated, will soon contain much more information.

Collections regarding Polish Americans: Ibero-American manuscript collections of Edmund Urbanski (1936-1990), Juan Wyskota-Zakrzewski (1930-1983) for researching history of Polish immigrants in the South and Latin America, Frank Renkiewicz Papers and PIASA Records (1942-2000) – for researching history of Polish Americans in the USA.

Finding aids - inventory collections; database description in the electronic resources catalogue (folder level control). A new guide for the Archives will be published in the near future.